What if we could design a methodology to commercialize ingenuity?
The Next Chapter is an experimental initiative that converges the potential of idealist design with the power of capitalism to help brilliant ideas find traction.
Strategic design, applied towards ideal futures.

  • In a risk-averse sector, Utilidata’s team of utility experts, engineers, data scientists, policy experts, and technologists were promising a radical new solution, but navigating fundraising and business development proved challenging. 

    We collaborated with Utilidata leadership to navigate a growth strategy that included series B fundraising, welcoming an Advisory Board, mapping  early lighthouse partners and pilots, clarifying a USP, product naming and storytelling, thought leadership presentations, IIJA contract negotiations, and brand identity evolution.

  • Rhode Island’s Startup Ecosystem had been overshadowed by Boston and New York for decades, struggling for recognition, investment, and growth.

    We led a perspective of how RI stakeholders might catalyze a high growth startup ecosystem. Our solution was to set a vision for 2035 in which the state claimed $2B in startup investments, a number 12x higher than it was in 2023. Leveraging preferable futures enabled us to design a big initiative to galvanize stakeholders and map precisely how that future state could be achieved.

  • Xcimer's team of physicists and engineers had built a credible path to commercial fusion energy — but translating deep science into a narrative the world could find valuable remained the gap between breakthrough and traction.

    We worked with Xcimer to turn a technical solution into a brand: clarifying their story, shaping how the technology communicates its promise, and building the strategic and visual foundation to support a $100M Series A launch.

  • Hexagon is a global leader in digital reality solutions — sensor, software, and autonomous technologies — but lacked the company’s vision of a more sustainable future.

    We worked directly with Hexagon's CEO to design a VIP brainstorming session that brought industry executives together around a provocation: how sustainability and profitability could work together to produce valuable outcomes for businesses. The format moved beyond presentation into structured, facilitated thinking — a model for how large organizations can use convening as a strategic tool.

Our goal is to develop medium-agnostic strategies that imagine best-case outcomes for those working on behalf of humanity and our planet.
Our work explores how designing the conditions for commercialization enables an organization, initiative, technology, or an idea to achieve its apex—driving cultural, communal, and planetary change. 
Building communities around ambitious ideas.

  • Capitalism is the most powerful distribution system on the planet, and ignoring it doesn't make ambitious ideas more pure — it makes them less likely to survive. The question isn't whether to engage with markets, but how to design the conditions under which markets accelerate ideas worth advancing.

    Commercialization, in our practice, is not the end of the creative process — it's a design problem in itself. We treat the path from concept to traction as something that can be intentionally shaped: through narrative, partnerships, incentive structures, and experience design. The goal is to make the leap from brilliant idea to viable reality a matter of strategy, not luck.

  • Most organizations working on transformative ideas fall into one of four positions: high commercial viability with low systemic ambition, high ambition with low commercial infrastructure, strong on both but poorly coordinated, or early-stage on both and searching for traction. The Commercialization Quadrant is a diagnostic tool that maps where an organization sits today — and where the conditions need to shift for it to move.

    The quadrant helps us identify what's actually missing. Sometimes it's narrative clarity. Sometimes it's market timing, partner alignment, or a mismatch between internal capability and external perception. The value of the framework is in directing design effort toward the specific conditions that will unlock movement, rather than defaulting to a one-size-fits-all growth plan.

  • Idealist design is a systems-level strategy method that begins with a simple but radical move: define the ideal outcome first, then work backward to determine what must be true to make it real. Originating in the systems thinking work of Russell L. Ackoff and later advanced through interactive planning at Wharton, the method asks teams to temporarily suspend present-day constraints and imagine the most desirable, feasible version of their organization or ecosystem — as if it were being designed fresh today. Only after that ideal state is clearly described do constraints re-enter the conversation, as design variables rather than fixed limits. Historically used in large-scale innovation contexts such as Bell Labs’ telecommunications planning, idealist design shifts strategy from incremental optimization to condition creation. It treats the future not as something to predict, but something to architect — through deliberate choices in structure, incentives, narratives, partnerships, and experience.

TNC Reports explore the unbiased impact of societal, technological, environmental, economic, and political factors in areas with the greatest potential for change.

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Achieving "ideal" through collective action.
We start by imagining an ideal state five to ten years in the future, and then devise a series of conditions that must be met in order for that state to be achieved. From there, we leverage design as a tool to create the most ideal experience(s) within each condition. 

  • Our process begins where most strategy ends — with the outcome. Rather than auditing what exists and optimizing from there, we ask a different question: what does the ideal version of this organization, technology, or ecosystem look like five to ten years from now?

    From that ideal state, we work backward. We identify the conditions — technical, social, market-based, narrative, operational, relational — that must exist for that future to become likely. Each condition becomes a design brief. And each brief is addressed through the tools best suited to it: research, brand strategy, experience design, partnership architecture, or communications.

    The result is a strategy that doesn't just describe a direction — it maps the specific moves required to create the conditions for success.

  • We identify the conditions that must exist for success to become likely.

    Conditions can be technical, social, market-based, narrative, operational, or relational. They are also designable; influenced via signals, experiences, partnerships, and proof.

  • Preferability is a lens focused on what future is worth building, backing, and aligning around. It is a design criterion, not a prediction metric. It recognizes that markets — especially emerging ones — are shaped by coordinated belief and intentional signals as much as by trend lines. A preferable future is specific enough to guide decisions and attractive enough to mobilize partners, talent, and capital; creating directional coherence even in uncertainty.

Partners in strategy.
We are a collective of researchers, strategists, designers, and technologists. Our practice is collaborative and multidisciplinary by necessity — allowing us to work with and across a range of specialized industries and applications.

  • Alyssa is a strategist with 17+ years of experience helping organizations figure out who they are — and making that useful. Her work sits at the intersection of brand, business, and culture, informed by art history, architecture, and anthropology, but always pointed at growth and real decisions. She created TNC's methodology by converging Russell L. Ackoff's idealist design with applied design strategy — building frameworks that help organizations working on behalf of humanity and the planet find traction, funding, and a clear path forward. She has done this across climate tech, hospitality, real estate, and cultural institutions, directly alongside founders and leadership teams navigating what's next

  • Arvind is a research-led industrial designer whose practice spans climate tech, healthcare, and planetary systems. A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design's Master of Industrial Design program, he brings prototyping-driven design to complex technical challenges — from communicating fusion energy technology to mapping emerging blue-tech economies. At TNC, Arvind leads design research and digital experience work, translating strategic frameworks into tools, interfaces, and visual systems that make abstract ideas tangible and actionable.

  • Diana is a service designer, cultural strategist, and media artist whose work sits at the intersection of human-centered design, emerging technology, and social systems. A RISD Presidential Fellow, her practice explores how design can address systemic challenges — from regenerative ecologies to care infrastructure — with rigor and empathy in equal measure. At TNC, Diana brings cultural intelligence and qualitative depth to our research and strategy work, ensuring that the communities and contexts we design for are understood on their own terms.


  • TNC is a strategy practice, but strategy without execution is a poster on a wall. Our Creative Specialist Network is a curated group of agencies, studios, and independent practitioners built from over seventeen years of collaboration — designers, technologists, filmmakers, writers, developers, and builders who can bring any strategic framework to life. The network means TNC doesn't stop at the plan. When the work calls for brand identity, digital product, spatial design, content production, or experience architecture, we activate the right partners to design and build it. Strategy becomes real through design, and design becomes real through making.

Made better by design.
The world would be a different place if design was given credit not as a practice, but as a tool to be used on any number of problems. Imagine if every company had a Chief Design Officer. Or if we elected 
a Secretary of Design in local government. 

People whose job it is to think deeply with logic and empathy at the same time. To find universality while still appreciating nuance. To find beauty in the mundane and to improve solutions to problems we might not even realize we have.   

Because you can design anything: a chair, a cure, an intersection, an interaction, a menu, a meeting, a feeling. 

Design is a tool to imagine better, shared futures. Applied, it inspires new ways of living, and new futures to live in.

And we intend to do just that.